


you are my brightest burning star

by dashandlily



Series: jatp fics [1]
Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Awkward Flirting, Awkwardness, First Kiss, Fluff, Kissing in the Rain, M/M, i want a season 2 willex rain kiss so bad smh, if u see typos simply look away, theyre literally soulmates, this is so fake deep lmaoo, unedited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:20:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27837439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dashandlily/pseuds/dashandlily
Summary: Oh.Oh. Briskly, as Alex looks up, he realizes why.Willie.He’s shaking—out of nerves—aboutseeing Willie. Obviously. It’s so obvious now. In hindsight, he knows it shouldn’t be a big deal; logically, Alex knows this is just supposed to be him and his new friend hanging out together. Ofcoursethe logical part of Alex’s mind knows that, but…Well, tell that to his trembling hands and racing heart…or whatever’s thrumming in his chest, he supposes.—or, alex and willie get the nighttime rain kiss that they deserve
Relationships: Alex/Willie (Julie and The Phantoms)
Series: jatp fics [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2063556
Comments: 18
Kudos: 197





	you are my brightest burning star

**Author's Note:**

> it is 5:30 am and i’m writing about gay ghosts what is wrong with me 😀 it’s all pretty self explanatory, so i hope you enjoy !! <33  
> (title from perfect harmony !)

Alex shivers. Though it’s getting colder, he’s not exactly sure why he’s so chilled, or why he’s visibly shaking, mostly because he’s a ghost—he’s not particularly, well, _able_ to regulate body heat, or temperature, or—

Oh. _Oh_. Briskly, as Alex looks up, he realizes why. 

Willie. 

He’s shaking—out of nerves—about _seeing Willie_. Obviously. It’s so obvious now. In hindsight, he knows it shouldn’t be a big deal; logically, Alex knows this is just supposed to be him and his new friend hanging out together. Of _course_ the logical part of Alex’s mind knows that, but…

Well, tell that to his trembling hands and racing heart…or whatever’s thrumming in his chest, he supposes. 

Willie, with his long, dark, flowy hair, and his silver helmet, and his stupidly-cute, dopey smile, comes skating up to Alex, who’s standing in the middle of the path in the park, surrounded by grass, and shimmering yellow streetlights. He’d gotten a bit of time off from the band (finally, by the way; he wasn’t sure how many more longing stares from Luke and Julie to one another he could’ve seen before he just, like, mashed their faces together so they’d finally do something about it), so he figured he’d, like, ask Willie to hang. As friends—of course. Of course. 

The boy stops riding just as soon as he gets close enough to Alex to quit, right in front of a couple, two boys, walking side-by-side with one another, bumping shoulders and giggling quietly to a joke one of them made. Willie smiles at the interaction, and points back at them for Alex to see, opening with, “Awe, they’re cute, aren’t they?”

Alex swears that if his heart hadn’t been racing before, it’s certainly racing now. Yeah, they were. They _are_ cute. And free.

When he’d died, he’d been in such a sticky situation in regards to—well, everything. Himself, his family, the band. Everything had been crumbling around him for _weeks_ before the accident, all kick-started thanks to his coming out, and he hadn’t known back then that he was someday going to get a chance at a do-over, so to speak. Everything’s better today. Those boys are able to do what Alex was never, ever allowed to. 

So, yeah, it’s really, _really_ cute, and Alex is really, _really_ quite jealous. 

“They are,” he says, but his voice sounds hollow. This is already off to a great start, he thinks. “Um, so how—how are you?” 

Willie shrugs his shoulders in that nonchalant, casual way that he always does, like he’s never had a care in the world, and Alex feels his heart—maybe not—grow tenfold. All he had to do was shrug his shoulders, and Alex’s chest would flutter, and his legs would turn to jelly?

If he’s being honest, nothing about this is fair, he thinks. Willie probably isn’t feeling any of the cozy, mellow butterflies that Alex is right now. 

“I’m good, yeah, just skating, day-in, day-out, as I do. This—you—it’s a change of pace, you know? Um, it’s really nice,” Willie says, taking a step past Alex, motioning for the two of them to start on the path. Alex quickly follows Willie’s lead as to not keep him waiting, and he takes his place walking on the left of his friend. 

For a moment, the two of them walk in comfortable silence, until Willie clears his throat. “How’s Julie and the band going?” 

“We’re called Julie and the _Phantoms_ ,” Alex defends, and then looks over at Willie. The look on his face signifies, though, that he probably wasn’t exactly trying too hard to get the band name right. He cracks a smile at Alex’s obliviousness regardless, because honestly, it was…cute. 

Willie looks back at him, and then down to the ground as he stuffs his hands into his jacket pockets. “Yeah, I know, Alex.”

“You knew?” Alex asks.

“Of course I knew,” says Willie, as if it were the most simple thing in the world to him. Of course he knew. _Of course he knew._

Alex gulps down the knot that rises in his throat, and then wildly nods. “Yeah, yeah, obviously. Of course.”

“So, I take it that it’s all going well with Julie?”

Alex nods. “Yeah, yeah, I think so! She got back into her music program a while ago and she’s been doing really good, which is what we’ve all been really hoping for! The band is going good, too, we’ve got songs and I’ve been coming up with better drum beats, getting all those years worth of lost practice, and I—” he cuts himself off. He’s definitely rambling, and he’s definitely still shaking, and—wow, this really doesn’t get easier, does it? “I…I—sorry.”

Except something sort of amazing happens. It’s just a few words—by all means, a few measly, little words from Willie—but it sort of makes all the difference. 

“Don’t be sorry. You what?” 

Alex can feel the tension he’d been holding in his shoulders wash away, and he feels a smile trying to pull on his lips. He lets it. “And…I don’t know. I guess I kind of feel more alive now than I ever did before. You know, Julie and the band and stuff. And you.”

Willie doesn’t respond, but there’s a big smile on his face, and a new sway in his step. They’re nearly bumping into each other with every pace as they walk shoulder-to-shoulder down the dark, lit path. 

A crack of thunder rips through the sky, and for the first time tonight, raindrops start falling around the boys. They’re not quite blissfully unaware of the storm coming right for them, but it’s not too much like it matters, because they’re ghosts and they don’t exactly have any repercussions to face should they get drenched in the storm. 

“Should we not get inside somewhere, or…?”

“Alex?” Willie asks softly, turning to the boy walking next to him. He holds back the laugh that’s threatening to come out. 

“What?”

“Alex, you’re a ghost, remember?” 

Alex pauses for a moment, right beside Willie, and then drops his head. “Right.”

“I take it you forget, too?”

“Oh, God, yes, all the time!” Alex starts, and his voice is suddenly explosive with emotion, as if he’s never felt so heard in his life. “It’s a _really_ big change to get used to and I’m still, like, _when should I go eat? When should I go to the bathroom? Am I supposed to be cold right now?_ It’s so weird.” 

Willie nudges Alex’s arm with his shoulder—his hands are still stuffed deep inside of his jacket pockets—to motion for him to start walking again. “It takes adjusting—like, a lot of it. Sometimes I still forget, too.”

Alex nods. “Good to know I’m not alone,” he says, but it ends up coming out a lot more bitter than he had intended it to. “That sounded weird. It’s just that Luke and Reggie don’t really know—or, I guess, they don’t really talk about this kind of stuff. Not with me, anyway.”

“I get it, man. It’s a lot to get used to.” 

“And change is really hard for me, you have no idea. You’d think, you know, with everything that happened, I’d be more well-adjusted, but…” 

Willie shrugs again, and Alex feels that same rush of God-knows-what, (but he could certainly get used to it) flowing through him. It’s electric, nearly. He just doesn’t get how this guy is so _effortlessly cool_ without even trying, like Luke, or even Julie, except so rugged, and mysterious, and, admittedly, really cute. “That’s what your drums are for, right? To help with those nasty anxieties?”

“You got it,” Alex says, giving Willie the slightest of smiles. There’s no better way to cure your anxieties than by wailing on some drums, he always says. “So…”

“So?”

Alex huffs, but he tries to make it as quiet as he can. He’s not even sure why Willie’s bothering to spend the time of day on him—on _him_ , of all people? Alex is so awkward, and finicky, and so awfully anxious about everything he can’t quite wrap his mind around fully, and yet Willie looks at him as if he hung the moon, and the stars, and the whole damn solar system, or as if he figured out that notoriously complicated cure for cancer? Willie spends the time of day answering his questions about anything and everything, and listening to him and all of his worries, as if he has an eternity to hear the ins and outs of all of the stories that run through Alex’s veins, the tales that are so deeply engraved, and carved, right into his very bones. 

Well, Alex figures, he kind of _does_ have an eternity to do so. 

That’s entirely besides the point, though. 

“Sorry, I just…” Alex starts, but his sentence quickly tapers off. He’s not sure exactly how to finish it. I just…don’t meet new people like this very often? I just died for twenty-five years and therefore don’t need to connect with people anymore? I just have a handful of friends that know me inside and out, and now it’s too difficult to start to open myself up to new people again? 

I just don’t know how to talk to _incredibly_ cute boys like you? 

Alex goes with the safest route he can. “Just don’t really know what to say, I guess.” 

Willie hums, and then stops in his tracks. He looks up towards the sky, dark as ever, lit up by the millions of constellations so far away, and the streetlights on the edge of their path, so blindingly close. The droplets of water that are falling around them make no difference, really, but Willie supposes it is a fairly pretty sight. “You see that star up there?” He asks, and then points directly up and above the two of them. 

“The really bright one?” Alex asks. He’s squinting, trying to find where Willie’s pointing to. There’s, quite literally, thousands and thousands of stars that he could be trying to gesture to, after all. 

“Uh huh. That’s the North Star,” Willie says. “You know what that is, yeah?”

“Vaguely,” Alex supposes. He’s never really paid attention to the stars before. To him, they’re all kind of the same. He guesses he just said that to impress Willie, to which he thinks he did, because Willie’s face sort of lights up in this brilliant way that not even the moon’s beautiful light could ever capture just perfectly right. Alex’s heart flutters so hard he thinks he might be teetering on feeling nauseated—in the best possible way. 

Maybe lying is good sometimes, he thinks. 

“So, the North Star doesn’t actually move, really,” Willie says. “The world kind of revolves around that one single, really bright star. It basically just marks where the North Pole is…actually, you know, if you don’t have a compass with you and you’re lost at night, you can use the North Star to try and get yourself back on track. Neat, huh?” 

Alex doesn’t even bother to stare up at the sky like Willie is, opting rather to stare directly at the man in front of him. His heart is so overwhelmingly full, it’s practically bursting at the seams with joy right now. Before he’d met Willie, he had Luke, and Reggie, and Julie—and he felt whole. Now, though, now that he knows Willie—there was a colossal shift in his universe, in his entire being, his existence, just to make room for this fourth and final person to fit just right. Alex has to swallow down the emotions he’s feeling, because, dear God, he’s never felt this way about another person before—nobody could truly hold a candle to what Willie is to Alex, and there’s sort of nothing he’d rather do in the entire universe but kiss him. 

“Neat, yeah,” is all Alex can really find himself saying. The noise of the rain falling around them falls away almost entirely, and all Alex can really think of is two, monumental, colossal things: 

First, there’s nothing he’d rather do than kiss Willie right now, and second, he thinks Willie might just be his own North Star. 

“Sorry,” Willie tries to laugh it off, but the tone in his voice says he clearly feels sort of bad. He doesn’t want to bore Alex with him rambling about _astronomy_ of all things. “I just figured that since we weren’t really—”

And then something magical happens. Alex isn’t really sure what kind of confident Luke-slash-Reggie spirit possessed him, but he takes one step closer to Willie, and then another, and then reaches out and places both of his hands on either side of Willie’s jaw. Willie is knocked speechless. “Can I kiss you?” Asks Alex, his voice lower than the dreary hum of the artificiality, the fabrication, of all of the world around. All of it falls away with Willie’s slight nod of head, and then his eyes fluttering shut, and his body melting into Alex’s touch as if he was meant for nothing more, and nothing less, than to be in Alex’s arms—as if this is what he’s been hoping for the whole time. Alex feels smaller arms wrap around his middle, and takes it as all the more invitation to lean. 

The kiss isn’t anything particularly special—it’s a bit awkward, and a bit giggly. It’s been a while since he’s kissed anyone—like, literally decades—so he gives himself the excuse that it’s alright to be bad right now, because he’s very obvious out of practice. Alex doesn’t remember feeling those infamous fireworks from the first time he’d ever kissed someone (though it _was_ with a girl at a random high school party, so that certainly could have something to do with it), and he’s not sure he feels fireworks, per se, now, either. Maybe that could be chalked up to the fact that he’s a ghost and, well, logically shouldn’t be able to feel much of anything. 

It’s more like the feeling of butterflies deep, deep down in his stomach, and a woozy, all-consuming giddiness electrifying the tips of his toes and the top of his head. It’s everywhere, and it’s everything, and yet it’s kind of nothing at the same time, because, well, _he_ was nothing more than…anything.

It was enough though. Alex realizes whatever that first kiss was, was far more than enough, no matter how little he truly existed. It was perfect, and enough, and so’s Willie—standing right in front of him, with the biggest smile on his face that Alex is sure he’s ever seen. 

“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that,” says Alex, letting out an exasperated laugh, bowing his head. His hands are still draped around Willie’s shoulders. They’re where they’re meant to be. 

Willie raises his eyebrows, as if it’s a challenge. He hums, and then laughs. “Why didn’t you?”

“Why didn’t _you_?” Alex retorts, and then finally drops his arms. This is all so funny, and a bit silly, and so, so perfect. 

“Maybe I was waiting for you first.”

“Whatever,” Alex rolls his eyes. He takes a deep breath. “It’s done now, at least. It was probably terrible…I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m kind of out of practice.”

“You’re awful eager to move on,” Willie teases, and then nudges Alex. “Come on, Lex. First kisses are monumental, aren’t they? And yes—I definitely could.” 

“Dude!” Alex exclaims, nudging Willie, feigning offense. “Okay, never mind to that! Please, let’s move on,” he begs. 

“Ah,” Willie hums. “Move on? You’ve got our second kiss in mind already?” 

Alex shrugs, “I don’t know. I guess you’ll just have to find out,” but there’s a glint in his eye that says he’s never truly been more eager in his life. 

“Whatever,” mocks Willie. But he’s smiling, too.

“I’ll leave it up to you this time, though. I think it’s your turn to be first.”

**Author's Note:**

> if u made it this far......idk whether to say i’m sorry or thank you LMAO. my twitter and tumblr are both @/flutterbyflynn , i’d love to talk to u !! tyy for reading i appreciate u to the moon and back :D


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